| Popis: |
Background Rising childhood obesity with its derimental health consequences is a multifactorial phenomenon and poses a challenge to the health care system. To tackle its complexity, community-based interventions with focus on the involvement of different settings and stakeholders are emerging as promising so far. The project 'Familie+ - Gesundes Zusammenleben in Familie und Schule’ (‘Family+ - Living healthily together in family and school‘) is a community-based intervention aiming to prevent obesity among primar school children in three German municipalities and is based on a multi-setting and participatory approach. This study applies network analysis to examine network relations between stakeholders potentially relevant to the project in two rural and one urban model region in Germany.MethodsTelephone surveys were conducted to assess several key variables including frequency of contact and intensity of collaboration. Community health promotion was established differently in all three model regions at the time of the survey. Process characteristics such as density, centrality, and connectedness were analyzed using UCINET 6.0 software and graphical representations of the networks were created using NetDraw. ResultsThe networks were mainly characterized by their different sizes as well as different distribution of network partners in terms of their subject matter and structure. Network partners interact with each other mostly on a quarterly basis and in the context of informal collaboration. ConclusionsBased on the results of the network analysis, it appears to be useful to initialize a community health facilitator provided with necessary resources and training at the health policy level in community health promotion projects, irrespective of the rural or urban structure of the region. The participatory involvement of relevant actors initiated by the facilitator can have a positive influence on the effective dissemination of information and networking with other stakeholders. |
